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Media Circus Numbers are Important, but Crazed Egos and Rivalries are Fun! |
| Boy, there's nothing the media industry loves more than writing about the media industry. I've covered that beat since early 2007 at Bloomberg, initially with a focus on new media, but as I stay on it I've been pulled more and more into the world of the traditional companies, and now I can cover them in all their low-growth splendor too. They are fun: There's nothing like a dual- voting structure like the ones that dominate this business to assure that some seriously strange people gain and keep power. I mean, when it's Sumner v. Tom, who do you root for? Most of these clips also appear under the Deals and Dealmakers tab, if you've been there already. Barry Diller. Like much of Wall Street, I was a Barry Diller bull in 2003, when he put together $9 billion of deals to create IAC/InterActiveCorp. So I called him The Web Mogul in this cover. By 2004, I was turning up the heat. By 2005, I exposed the division between IAC and Expedia, Diller's biggest-ever deal, in this piece. In 2007, Diller moved to break up his remaining empire. John Malone. This one won an internal award at Bloomberg because it was, as our New York bureau chief said, the first story about Malone's crazily complex empire he had ever understood. It also broke news of Malone's rift with Diller over Expedia, which led to a 20% jump in Expedia stock within a month of this May 2007 story. Also, for all the Street's skepticism at the time, our analysis of how DirecTV is doing against cable companies is looking better and better. DirecTV rose 18% over the next five months, while cable stocks fell 20%, as DTV picked up market share. The annoying part: Because I don't get to do personality journalism at Bloomberg, my January 2007 pitch to make this story about the division between Diller and Greg Maffei, a former Expedia chairman Malone had hired to run Liberty Media, was left for the Journal to do (and to do brilliantly, and on page one) nine months later. We did the numbers, and did them well, because that's what we do. But the numbers weren't the real story. Sam Zell and Tribune. I did two stories about Zell's $14-billion-of-other- people's money deal to buy Tribune in the summer of 2007. The first was followed by the NYT, BusinessWeek and other wire services, and was about how the deal was likely to collapse around 2010 because Tribune was blowing the financial projections the deal was based on. In the second piece, I explained how to make money off the chaos, since the deal’s structure meant Zell’s financial incentives were still to go ahead and close the buy, even though the market was betting he wouldn't. If you followed my fairly explicit advice to buy Tribune stock, you made an annualized return of more than 100%. Shares hit a 52-week low the day this story appeared and then moved up 50% in four months, exactly as we predicted. Mario Gabelli, the Dolans and Cablevision. I came onto the Cablevision story late, but began breaking the scoops as soon as I did. I broke four stories in a month as the $22 billion deal moved toward defeat, and did the definitive numbers story on why the LBO went down and why Cablevision is worth much more than the market thinks. The market thinks this story is wrong, judging from the stock price, but it's early yet. Bottom line: The day shareholders voted on this deal, the NY Post said it would pass, the WSJ said it was too close to call, the NYT did no story and Bloomberg said it was dead. One for four. McClatchy, Real Estate Ads and the Net. You had to see the look on this CEO's face when I asked if he had really dumped hisTwin Cities papers because he knew when he sold them that Minnesota's biggest realtor was pulling 75 percent of its advertising. Well, uh, we'd heard some things, he stammered. Good times. Romemesko linked to this story, and the Infectious Greed blog called it "harrowing reading.'' |
